[Paraview] ParaView in parallel

[Paul Edwards]

Hi,

I've been experimenting with ParaView in parallel without much.  Below I
have listed my setup, experiences and questions!

*Setup*
My setup is a 6 node gigabit cluster (without gfx cards), compiled with
OSMesa.  The filesystem is only a RAID on the frontend exported with NFS.
Each node has 8 cores and I experimented running with both 1 core per node
and also 8 cores per node

*Data*
The data I am reading is multiple blocks, where each contains an
unstructured grid and a multiblock structure of polydata surfaces.  The data
is about 10 million points in total.

*Reader*
My reader is not written for parallel so I loaded in the mesh and
partitioned it with D3.  The partitioning took a long time - approx 2 mins -
is this normal?  When the data was partitioned I didn't really notice much
difference in speed and the rendering performance was considerably worse
than a single node for the same data.  Is this just the result of using
OSMesa?  If so, does anyone have any suggestions for the number of nodes to
be running on?  I also tried saving my data once it was partitioned but then
loading it actually took longer (is this due to a lack of parallel
filesystem?)

*Filters
*I tried to run some of my custom filters but one that calculates scalar
variables for pointdata didn't display the variables in the GUI after
running the filter.  Do I to do something different for parallel filters?

Finally, is there any documentation for implementing parallel readers (or
simple examples) in ParaView?  And, does anyone have any suggestions for how
to split up the data?

Thanks,
Paul
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